Beyond Immortal

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Edited by Nate Barna, 19 August 2005 - 06:49 PM.

I think the nature of an immortal existence is a hard one to pin down in all aspects. If there is infinite knowledge then immortals will not necessarily have an existential crisis leading to voluntary suicide. What is the nature of time to an immortal, we as humans feel the passing of time in an arbitrary and subjective way based on our biology. If we wanted to (when/if such technological development is attained) we could live our lives at an incredibly increased rate so that every measured unit of time would allow us to do more and experience more. With infinite time to exist it would not matter at what rate we chose to learn and experience things. In infinite time with infinite information would we become omniscient beings, would an immortal "brain" eventually be able to transcend the time dimension and view events at any rate in any time as an observer of events. What if immortals became beings that are able to travel to any point on the timeline of this universe, having executive judgment on where, when, and how they exist. Is there a plateau of existence? Perhaps we become our own gods, the aformentioned descriptions sounds similar to one. What of our consciousness, is there a higher form of consciousness, what becomes our mind and the way we percieve the world? Will hedonism prevail and existenial agony be relinquished from then on.

This kind of speculation is quite interesting, but we're talking about something so far removed from our world and environment that the likelyhood of far different and unexpected outcomes seems to overshadow it greatly.

What would stop us from seeking knowledge? As children we are very curious about the world around us, it would reason that immortal beings are eternally curious otherwise they would, as you say, live a hedonistic paradise doing nothing. That latter might be necessary because the futility of their existence doing nothing, something that is agonized over by even finite living non-hedonistic beings, would lead them to suicide.

"Minds are still generally hung up on perfecting their analytical skills, so it becomes almost impossible to comprehend that at some future point in time analytical skills will have become redundant and all volitional activity is based on preconceived a priori truths that have no inherent utility."

If there is infinite information to be assimilated and immortal beings exist inextracably with the time dimension of this universe then they will have an inextinguishable source of knowledge. If they are able to transcend the confines of this universes, it's dimensions and physical laws, our ability to define them and their existence would seem entirely speculative and futile.

I would love to see this discussion continue, even if it seems like an exercise in futility, at the very least it broadens our horizon for what immortal existence may be like in some broad sense.

What if the standard is “Everything that can be known should be known”? This is fine. However, among the base of infinite trivial models of reality, which ones will be meaningful? Suppose minds achieved mathematical perfection in modeling reality. How could standards – and they can be personal moralities – be derived so that anything created would be a product of wisdom and not of arbitrary whims like chmess?  If standards could be based on utility, what sort of standards are there for deeming that something would have utility in the first place?

Nate, I may be missing something here, but wouldn't trial and error suffice? Couldn't an "optimized consciousness" produce multiple copies of itself so as to maintain a certain percentage of its aggregate consciousness on the (best known) model of reality, all the while sacrificing a certain percentage of its consciousness in exploring novel, and potentially superior, models of reality?

I always like your posts Nate..

Here's some convoluted blabbing..

If our reality truly is parametrized and fixed, then feasbily we will eventually reach a state of knowing all there is to know and the 'pure observer', still unavailed of a final 'answer', may choose to use this knowledge to 'reboot' reality and itself along with it. Of course it may just go stark raving mad as well..

I'm more of the mind that reality is an emergent phenomena which is not constant and whose parameters are subject to change. I believe the search for a purpose for our existence (or pure truth) is an aspect of the same processes which govern all informational interactions.

If there is one constant in my reality it is change. Merging entropy and ectropy one might see that there is an endless remodelling of the sculpture of reality. The search for meaning, to my mind, is how the emergent phenomena of consciousness experiences this 'remodelling' and although an intense personal experience, really is simply an expression of a rather impersonal facet of physical phenomena. The 'truth' of existence is that our sense of who we are is just an extension of the very same basic processes which take apart and rearrange all the rest of our reality.

Come to think of it, it might just be that everything pure observers do would either revolve around endlessly designing arbitrary problems

Possibly not arbitrary.. but evolving maybe?

I personally dont' think 'pure observer' status is obtainable as the concept assumes a totally objective stance where the environment and observer are separate entities when I think they are aspects of the same thing. As the observer evolves the environment also changes providing the observer with a new set of parameters to observe.

Even if it were possible to attaing 'pure observer' status, when the entity arrived at that point they would cease to exist as a sense of self requires something that is 'not self' to observe. When all is understood, and there is nothing left to observe, all truth would have been integrated with immortality and pure observer status obtained. Whatever the entity would be after that, it would not longer see itself as such.

You understood me completely and I you less so although this is more my lack of understanding than your clarity.

Meaningless or arbitrary as it might seem, existence, or rather persistence, seems to be the preference rather than the opposite, or there would be no patterns to observe. We experience our reality from a finite perspective and it is difficult to imagine the nature of infinity on both ends of the continuum, but this is exactly what I think we are up against in trying to understand reality. Our current form is limited in our ability to comprehend what I think is a much more interesting universe than our senses and three dimensions are capable of perceving.

Volition is nothing more than sophisticated molecular vibration. Value judgements, emotions, even the very notion of meaning and the search for truth are all inherent within the imperative to exist and persist in a vibrating universe. Is the 'choice' of position of an atom as it takes its place in the formation of crystal volitional? Perhaps so, at some elemental level as the motion it takes coalesces out of the set of probabilities according to the physical parameters which influence but not guarantee its' behavior.

Maybe the motion of an atom doesn't deserve placement in the continuum of deliberation, but at what level does an entity get some space allotted? A bacterium is attracted towards food, a plant to light. Are these 'simple' responses so different than those arising from an evolution of cognitive abilities which help our biology persist and procreate? We are a mess of complex adaptation with our biology trying to replicate physically and our minds trying to do so psychically. Procreation is part of nature and biology and as such intuitively understandable. The act of creation of mind objects is not quite so easy to explain as it seems at times at odds with more physical imperatives.

The only constant I see now is the constant rearrangment of entities which have through 'natural selection' persisted long enough to be incorporated as fundamental building blocks of new permutations. In this light, anything else might seem somewhat meaningless.. but hey.. that's life, what are you going to do?

Here’s a much better explanation on Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.
http://www.alfred.no...farleigh_01.pdf

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Whitehead’s Even More Dangerous Idea
by Peter Farleigh
“....any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there can be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism, at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas 1933
Introduction:

“Old habits die hard”, writes Daniel Dennett in a short newspaper article that was part of a prelude to the Tucson II conference, “especially habits of thinking, and our ‘intuitive’ ways of thinking about consciousness are infected with leftover Cartesian images, an underestimated legacy of the dualist past.” (Dennett 1996) Materialists and functionalists pride themselves on how much they have rejected Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of nature into two separate entities – mind-things and substance-things. They attempt to explain how mind arises either from raw matter, or from some sort of information processing. Others, who think that mind is ‘mere bluff’, choose a third option – the eliminativist one. Consciousness for them does not really exist as we might imagine, but is a construction based on our “old habits” of folk psychology.

Materialists, functionalists and eliminativists may have critically rejected the Cartesian images of consciousness from their schemes, but for whatever reason, they have uncritically accepted the Cartesian image of matter. Matter in this case, being “an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist”. Matter as ‘simply located’. In sharing this much with the dualists, should they more properly claim to have rejected just half of the dualist doctrine?

Cartesian substance provides the ground for the classical mechanistic paradigm, Newton’s ‘world-machine’ – the ‘billiard-ball’ universe – a powerful metaphor still very much with us today (e.g. Dawkins 1995). While, there are some contemporary forms of materialism that have a less deterministic view of substance, as modified in the light of modern physics and biology (e.g. Searle 1992), it is the functionalists who have gallantly upheld the very traditional mechanistic concept of matter in motion. The prime model for them being the computational metaphor for the mind.

In rejecting our ‘folk psychology’ concepts, we could equally make a case for rejecting our ‘folk physics’ concepts, too (i.e. the ‘billiard-ball’ variety). But if we were to throw out the machine along with the ghost, what would our starting point be? If it’s not substance, and if it’s not information processing, what then? Are we to exclude these concepts altogether, or are they part of a much larger scheme?

Whitehead’s even more dangerous idea:

Darwin is rightly said to have a ‘dangerous’ idea with his theory of natural selection. (Dennett 1995) With respect to the nature of mind and matter, Alfred North Whitehead has an even more dangerous idea. An idea that he investigates in enormous detail, particularly in his major philosophical work Process and Reality written in 1929. It is to reject Cartesian dualism fully, and in “point(ing) out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science”, construct a scientific world-view in terms of events and their relations, rather than in terms of matter in motion. Certain sorts of events and temporal series of events (processes), would then hold the status as the fundamental units or ‘primitives’ of the universe – a position traditionally the domain of Cartesian substance. These events provide a unity between the observer and the observed, subject and object. Rejecting dualism fully meant for Whitehead, that epistemology has no priority over ontology – any inquiry into knowing is simultaneously an inquiry into being. (Cobb 1981)

Whitehead’s process cosmology has ‘dangerous’ implications in many areas of science and philosophy and not primarily because he offers us new answers to the old problems. Rather, it is because we are offered another perspective-one that includes the observer in our observing. Dangerous, particularly for dualists, materialists functionalists and eliminativists as it displaces the concept of machine as the primary metaphor for our understanding the world – a position now given to the concept of organism. In this short paper I aim to give a very brief introduction to his event ontology with respect to the philosophy of mind.

From Substance-thinking to Event-thinking:

Events, as we commonly refer to them, are happenings in certain places, at certain times, for particular durations – everything from the fall of an autumn leaf, to the fall of the Roman Empire. We can discuss such events by starting with concepts of matter in motion, but such an approach is a limited case of a more general view that regards matter, itself, as aggregates of sub-atomic events, as modern physics has shown. Sub-atomic events are instances of the fundamental types of events that Whitehead takes as the basis for his ontology.

Bertrand Russell felt the force of this idea. In 1914 Whitehead convinced him “to abandon Newtonian absolute time and space, and also particles of matter, substituting systems of events” and this “fitted in well with Einstein”. (Ushenko 1949) He further elucidated the Whiteheadian concept of matter when he later wrote: “An event does not persist and move, like the traditional piece of matter; it merely exists for its little moment and then ceases. A piece of matter will thus be resolved into a series of events. Just as, in the old view, an extended body was composed of a number of particles, so, now each particle, being extended in time, must be regarded as composed of what we may call ‘event-particles’. The whole series of these events makes up the whole history of the particle, and the particle is regarded as being its history, not some metaphysical entity to which the events happen.” (Russell 1969)

Whitehead’s ‘Actual Occasions’:

Whitehead does not confine his fundamental unit-events to the sub-atomic level, his is not a ‘quantum mechanics’ theory of mind per se. Rather, his speculation is that there are universal principles operating at all levels in nature, quantum mechanical phenomena being instances of these principles at one extreme, and psychological phenomena being instances at another. So not only the low-grade sub-atomic events, but also atomic, molecular and cellular events count as fundamental Whiteheadian ‘actual occasions’. The most complex high-grade events are the most familiar ones-moments of human perception, or percipient events. All of these occasions have to some degree, a subjective or psychophysical nature. An occasion, technically for Whitehead, being an “occasion of experience”, though not necessarily a conscious experience.

While Whitehead is quite the opposite to an eliminativist, he nevertheless does not write extensively about consciousness itself, preferring to talk in more general terms about experience and feeling. “We experience more than we can analyze. For we experience the universe, and we analyze in our consciousness a minute selection of its details.” (Whitehead 1938) For instance, we are conscious of the person we are talking to at a party while at the same time experiencing the ambience of the crowd. He sees the major role of consciousness to be the explicit awareness that a present situation could be other than it is, and so one is conscious of what it is. We could be talking to anyone at the party, but we are talking to this person.

Broadening the concept of experience beyond the familiar human realm to include the lowest levels of nature maybe unsettling but not completely unreasonable. The fact that many of our day-to-day activities are performed ‘without thinking’, and that decisions and judgments are often colored by forgotten or suppressed memories, indicates that there is a continuity between conscious and unconscious experience. Ethologists like Donald Griffin (1992), and Susan Armstrong-Buck (1989), provide evidence for experience in animals. Others provide evidence for it in single-celled organisms. (see Agar 1951) Evidence for even sub-atomic particles having a very primitive subjective nature is given by McDaniel (1983).

The word ‘panpsychism’ is often used to describe Whitehead’s position, even though he did not use the word himself. The word can be problematic. For some, ‘psyche’, which usually pertains to the human mind, suggests that this position would hold that low-grade individuals like bacteria, or even electrons, are conscious. This certainly is not the case and David Ray Griffin suggests that ‘pan-experientialism’ is a more appropriate term. (Griffin 1988) One should not expect all of the characteristics of mentality we observe at the macro-scale to be evident at the micro-scale, just as we no longer expect the physicality to be the same at both levels. For instance, the atoms in a sponge aren’t expected to be ‘spongy’, themselves. The word ‘pan’ should also not be misconstrued. Meaning ‘all’, it can imply that everything has some mentality, which again, is certainly not true. Things like tables, teapots, thermostats and tetraflop computers, are regarded as uncoordinated aggregates of low-grade occasions and have no mental properties in themselves. Whitehead distinguishes them from things like cells and organisms:
“...in bodies that are obviously living, a coordination has been achieved that raises into prominence some functions inherent in the ultimate occasions. For lifeless matter these functionings thwart each other, and average out so as to produce a negligible total effect. In the case of living bodies the coordination intervenes, and the average effect of these intimate functionings has to be taken into account.” (Whitehead 1933)
In other words, in ordinary matter neighbouring occasions are ‘incoherent’ and so there is a ‘smoothing out’ effect of the tiny freedoms and unpredictabilities that can be found in those occasions in isolation. The causal chains are constant and predictable, and so the descriptions of matter by traditional physical theory are therefore statistically very accurate and hence, mechanistic analogies are most useful and appropriate.

In contrast, things like molecules and organisms are temporal chains of high-grade occasions and are characterized by their part-whole relations. The organization of their parts is dependent on the mutual action of those parts on each other, with the consequence that the whole acts as a causal unit both on its own parts and on its environment. A molecule or an organism acts as a causal unit in a way, which is other than the summed causal actions of the lower grade occasions taken in isolation. For instance the properties of a molecule are different from the sum of the properties of its constituent atoms, even though both the properties and synthesis of the molecule are entirely dependent on the intrinsic properties of those atoms. This is not due to some miraculous addition, but because the activity of all actual occasions, including mental and percipient events, is fundamentally relational from the start.

There has of course, been a lot of study of the self-organization of living things with computer models using artificial life and artificial neural networks techniques. There is no doubt that these sorts of research programs provide us with new insights to understanding some of the nature of part-whole relations in actual organisms. On the other hand, the very fact that any modeling of the real world involves abstractions inevitably imposes limitations on the sort of results we should expect to get. It is sometimes easy to confuse the ‘abstract’ with the ‘concrete’. For instance if we were to believe that a computer virus is ‘alive’ in the biological sense. We would then be committing what Whitehead famously calls the "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness". A fallacy, by the way, the biologist C. H. Waddington warns us, “is dangerous to forget”! (Waddington 1977)

The nature of events and their relations:

Having established in general what Whitehead’s ‘actual occasions’ are, some explanation of their nature needs to be made. It might be thought that such an explanation is to be found by starting at the bottom and working up from there. In fact, the place to start, and the place that Whitehead wants us to start, is at the level of human experience. For two reasons: first, because human experience at any moment is itself, an actual occasion, and the occasion we know better than any other, and known from the inside. Second, because high-level occasions are themselves highly coordinated societies of low-level occasions, certain features of human experiential events can be generically applied to more primitive occasions.

Consider the act of perception. It is by perception, and this involves cognition, intentionality and affective tone, that we take account of our environment. I look at a pencil in front of me, for example. I have an immediate sense of its overall look – its shape, its length, its color. The pencil is set against a background of my desk and other things in my field of vision, but not things I am at that moment acutely aware of. Also I am only vaguely aware of my body and its relation to the desk and pen. In seeing the pencil, too, whole streams of associative memories are stirred. All of these perceptions and memories are gathered together into the unity, which is this single percipient event – a “specious present”. The focal point or center of this event being my body. The pencil and the background, as well as the memories, are all internal constituents of my experience, and are therefore causally efficacious of that experiential event. They are said to be internally related to this event. Those objects at that moment are unaffected by my act of perception and so are said to be externally related to the event.

The act of perception then, establishes the causal relation of a subject to the external world at that moment. Perception and memory recall for Whitehead are high level instances of a more general concept, which he calls prehension. Most simply, for a subject to prehend an object, it is to experience it, perceive it, feel it, or ‘take it into account,’ though not necessarily in a conscious or reflective way. An object can be a physical object, like a pencil, or a conceptual object like a memory. Prehension is also a feature at lower levels of nature. Single cells ‘feel’ or take account of their environment (which is often other cells). Within a series of sub-atomic events, each event prehends its antecedent event, and is almost entirely determined by it.

The concept of prehension does sound a lot like the more familiar concept of intentionality. Indeed, Nicholas Gier has examined in depth the relations between the two concepts. Gier points out their similarities: “Both prehension and intentionality describe the relationship of a subject and an object in such a way as to overcome this subjectobject split. In the same way that intentionality is always ‘consciousness of an object,’ prehension is always ‘feeling of’ some datum. This means that any prehensive unification or intentional act is codetermined by the respective data.” (Gier 1976) One major difference is that intentionality is only discussed in terms of human consciousness, while prehension is extended far beyond the human realm. Both affirm a doctrine of internal relations so that consciousness is never simply ‘there’ without content or object, but with phenomenology the relationship of consciousness and its object is not considered a causal one. Whitehead had solved this problem of causation with his doctrine of asymmetrical relations between a present event and its past. Lewis Ford sums up the comparison by stating “Rather than being simply identical with intentionality, prehension generalizes both intentionality and causality, thus unifying both phenomenology and science.” (Gier 1976)

While being affected by the object I see, my experience is not completely determined by it. The present moment is tinged with the possibilities for what the next occasion might be, and this requires a certain creative response or choice by me that may or may not be a conscious one. I have a fairly conscious anticipation about what I want to do with the pencil, if anything at all – I may want a pen – and a much less conscious anticipation as to how I am to pick it up. A future event cannot be the physical cause of a present event – there is no backward causation. But a present event can be partly determined by the anticipation of the conceptual possibilities for what the succeeding event could be. This is known as the subjective aim of the occasion.

The breadth of possibilities for an event to occur is a measure of the amount of freedom within any particular causal chain – an extremely small degree at the sub-atomic level and a large degree of freedom at the human level. If the degree of freedom is zero then the causal chain is completely deterministic. Thus, Whitehead has a general theory of causation that is well adapted for explaining the nature of organic processes and mental events. Also, it is a theory if taken to one extreme, will explain the more specific nature of mechanistic events.

Conclusion:

It is a dangerous thing to change our mode of thinking – from looking at the world in terms of substances, to thinking of it in terms of events. All, and not just some, of our old Cartesian images have to go. Mind and matter are not separate. Mind is not rejected in preference for matter, and mind does not arise from matter that initially has no mind. This is because both concepts undergo a radical change within Whitehead's philosophy of organism and are replaced by the single concept of relational events. These events have characteristics that can be considered matter-like in some respects and mind-like in others.

As an approach that avoids the many of the pitfalls of dualism, materialism and functionalism, I believe it is equally a solid candidate theory of mind, worthy of serious consideration and discussion within the contemporary debate.

REFERENCES: (see link)

Nate: I posted this before I saw yours with the explanation of Whitehead's philosophy of organism and I just want to thank you. It makes me smile when I see things bumping about my head placed so much more succinctly and more clearly.. showing me that yet again, originality is not my strong suit. I can see now that the 'continuum of consciousness' which I think exists is available in Whiteheads philosophy!

My meanderings may bear some resemblance to Whitehead's but only by accident. I'm a long way from being familiar with philosophy. Most of what I've managed to get my head around has been through starting points I've found here at ImmInst so thanks for yet another.

Abstractions are difficult for me.. it generally takes a lot of percolating before something bubbles up from the froth worth rescuing from sinking back into the morass of my mind, so its nice to think that something not completely unformed has emerged.

I think I do understand you and there is surely much more to be said, but doing so is likely beyond my present capacity.. but I've never let incompetence prevent me from going backwards before.. [lol]

and hence the below..

The 'inaccessible' feelings are inaccessible because they are non-existent. It is the prehension of lower level feelings/less complex forms which allows them to 'crystallize', creating a bifurcation and providing a new substrate for the next level of perhension/complexity. Thus rather than a divider or gateway, one might see an expanding boundary within which is incorporated all previous lower levels/less complex forms which our consciousness creates.

This is not directly related but it has occured to me as I write this..

Consciousness, it seems to me, causes the vibration of ideas similar to how heat causes atoms to oscillate. With its dissipation, heat usually leaves atoms in a more stable arrangement which persists while with the dissipation of consiciousness, or at least its focus, ideas also tend to crystallize until another brings to bear the light of their awareness on it again, testing the mind objects stability, strength and ability to persist.

Consciousness perhaps is not an emergent phenomena at all, but is as basic and as fundamental a quality of the universe as the motion of particles and has its own continuum.. I wonder what absolute 0 consciousness would be like.. George Bush perhaps?

I found this quote of Whitehead's rather interesting..
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Perhaps more than civilization advances when the number of complex operations that can be performed automatically increase.

It seems quite certain to me that the number of possible realities is infinite. Thus an immortal mind would seem to be gauranteed meaning through discovery....there would always be new things to experience. No problems, right?

Unless knowing there is an infinite number of experiences, creates a feeling meaninglessness. As if this point of knowledge is the ultimate thing to know. If this is the ultimate thing to know, then I can see problems in finding meaning. It would seem that no matter how many realities there are, it all boils down to some sort of hedonistic adventure. Or as Tom T. Hall put it "Son....its faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money".

In contrast, if there was an "ultimate answer" or "end point" in the search for "the meaning" of the universe, then I would think that would be a sufficient attractor for all minds. Once that meaning was found, there would no longer be an attractor for any mind. What would happen next? Interesting thought experiment.

Ok, more babbling. I feel quite certain (near 100%) that there are an infinite number of realities to experience, but I cannot rule out the chance that there is an ulitimate answer/end point/meaning to the universe. This is an attractor for my mind.

This might sound overly simplistic, but unless conscious beings end up merging into a sea of undifferentiated consciousness, there will always be other minds to interact with. And even if I knew the ultimate secret of the Universe, the concept of being able to stay alive and interact with friends would be plenty of motivation to continue existing.

I think we can chase uniqueness onto infinity. Even after we have discovered all there is to discover there is still and infinite more we can create.

This might sound overly simplistic, but unless conscious beings end up merging into a sea of undifferentiated consciousness, there will always be other minds to interact with.  And even if I knew the ultimate secret of the Universe, the concept of being able to stay alive and interact with friends would be plenty of motivation to continue existing.

I truly hope so Azalyn. It would be quite ironic if, after all our struggling to attain ultimate knowledge, we arrived at the precipice only to find our reward was ultimate boredom. [mellow]

I think we can chase uniqueness onto infinity.  Even after we have discovered all there is to discover there is still and infinite more we can create.

This quotation speaks to me. [thumb]